Post-Soviet Yearning

It’s typical of Ochsner’s characters to step back from language like this, in the postmodern fashion, and consider words and language as physical things, with their individual textures and secret affinities. Azade can “curse in Ossetian and bless in Kumyk, those fibrous languages of mud and straw.” As a girl, Olga “collected languages the same way people collected keys or buttons. At night she dreamt in other languages and she woke in the morning with spoonfuls of those foreign sounds still on her tongue.” When Yuri receives a beating, it’s as if by ­typography: “A pounding punctuated with sharp interjections. A dash, dash. Boxer’s blows to the face. Oh Mother. A comma, a semicolon, a reprieve and then ellipses. All the pieces of punctuation brilliantly effected by the closed fist, the knee to the groin. Yes, he was getting the message.”

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Yet the message isn’t all bad, since it soon translates into an act of tenderness. Olga notes that a secondary “definition of the word ‘translate’ was to convey to heaven without death.” And when the building’s tenants are granted a vision of a muddy apocalypse, they can still manage to see what comes next.

For writers of the present moment, Russian and non-Russian, the Yeltsin years have become a caldron for a wildly imaginative, surreal literature grounded in post-Soviet exigency, a chilly Macondo stretching over 11 time zones. Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Tatyana Tolstaya and Olga Slavnikova have emerged with distinctive, revelatory fantasies. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s fine new collection of terrifying stories, “There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby,” employs gothic sorcery to populate these years with zombies and demons and ghosts. Gina Ochsner, an Oregon native, sticks her ladle into the same overheated pot and, with luminous writing, affection for her characters and, especially, faith in language’s humanizing power, manages to find a portion of hopefulness.